After yesterday’s segment on Yo Yo Ma, dare we discuss another cellist: Charlotte Moorman? Oh, we have to. There’s always room for cello.

Moorman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Nov. 18, 1933 and died in NYC ten days short of her 58th birthday. She was a cellist but better known as an advocate for, and performer of, avant garde music. She was the founder of the NY Avant Garde Festival. Upon graduating from Julliard, she began a traditional career but was pushed towards the avant garde by her friend and roommate Yoko Ono. Moorman said that one day she grew tired of a Kabalevsky cello piece she was playing, and someone suggested that she play John Cage’s “26 Minutes, 1.1499 Seconds for a String Player,” which, among other things, requires the performer to prepare and eat mushrooms. Once you color outside the lines, all hell breaks loose.

For the sixth Festival she performed a piece called Sky Kiss while suspended in the air from helium-filled weather balloons.

On February 9, 1967, Moorman performed Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique. During the first movement, Moorman played Elegy by Jules Massenet in the dark while wearing a bikini that had blinking lights. For the second movement, she played International Lullaby by Max Mathews while topless, and was arrested mid-performance. She was not able to return to perform the last two movements. She was charged with indecent exposure, though her penalty was later suspended, and she gained nationwide fame as the “topless cellist.” She was fired from the American Symphony Orchestra. (Fuck them!) Following Moorman’s death, Paik made a film entitled Topless Cellist (1995) about her life and avant-garde performances.

Here are some pix.

In the September 12, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Hilton Als reviews an exhibition on Moorman in an art gallery. He states: “One sees Moorman as she left us: electrified and alive to the ideas that she put forth as true performer-revolutionaries do, by making an example with her body, right there, naked and playful and truthful, in real time.”

---

It’s Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday today (Saturday). She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891 and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated African-American community in the U.S., with a population of about 125. Hurston loved it there. She is best known for the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which I’m glad I read. She studied anthropology at Barnard College on a scholarship. She was the only Black student at Barnard. She founded the Harlem Renaissance and was honored with a U. S. postage stamp, but died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

---

The clue for 32D today was “Bill Clinton played one on ‘The Arsenio Hall Show’ in 1992,” and the answer was TENORSAX. It prompted egs to chime in with:

Was it the soprano’s gun that killed him?
No, the TENORSAX.

I like seeing Yiddish in the puzzle. The clue at 38A was “He’s a mensch.” ANS: STAND UP GUY.

MEEPLE was new to me: “Human-shaped board game piece.”

Everyone’s fave today was 33A: “Eco-centric college class,” and the answer was ITALIAN LIT. Get it? “Eco” is the writer Umberto Eco.

Heard of Eero Aarnio? Me neither. It’s a clue puzzlers refer to as a WOE —What on earth? He’s a Finnish interior designer, 90 years old now, who designed the bubble chair and other items that formed part of pop culture in the 60s. The bubble chair was suspended from the ceiling.

---

Ken JENNINGS of Jeopardy fame hit the grid at 15D. As many of you know, he won Jeopardy 74 times in a row, netting over $2.5 million while doing so. He was beaten by Nancy Zerg on his 75th appearance. The Final Jeopardy category was Business & Industry, and the clue was “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.” Zerg knew it (H&R Block), but KJ blanked and guessed Fedex. Alex Trebek called Zerg a “giant killer.” (She came in third in the next show.)

Jennings is an active Twitter user, and some of his tweets have been controversial (which is a euphemism for assholey). In 2014, he angered disability rights groups by tweeting, “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” He may not be a mensch.

Here’s Nancy Zerg.

---

For some reason, the commentariat got into bad (punny) jokes about the 50 states today. They were really bad, e.g., “You don’t like my Maryland joke — stop being so crabby.” There is a point at which jokes are so bad that they become funny for being so bad. These didn’t get there — they were unredeemingly bad.

But they reminded me of a line I liked about Iowa by Bill Lee, the wonderful pitcher for the Red Sox many years ago. He said Iowa was so flat, you could stand on a chair and watch your dog leave you for three days.

---

We schlepped into the city to see a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore at Hunter College by the NY G&S Players today. The cast was terrific — every song was done well. And the silliness was relentless. As the lights went down, we were asked to silence our devices and locate the emergency exits and lifeboats. When the Captain stepped on board the ship, he assured the crew he had just tested negative for Covid.

I hereby appoint both of them (W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan) the Patron Saints of Owl Chatter. Here’s a quote from it:

“I am poor in the essence of happiness, lady — rich only in never-ending unrest. In me there meet a combination of antithetical elements which are at eternal war with one another. Driven hither by objective influences — thither by subjective emotions — wafted one moment into blazing day, by mocking hope — plunged the next into the Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair, I am but a living ganglion of irreconcilable antagonisms. I hope I make myself clear, lady?”

---

Thanks for stopping by!